This Entrepreneur Made A Job Site That College Students Are Using Instead Of LinkedIn | Forbes

It’s hard to get hired fresh out of college – doubly so if you are graduating from an under-the-radar school or don’t have plugged-in parents. Forbes 30 Under 30 alum Garrett Lord built Handshake to help.

At age 22, Garrett Lord accomplished the near-impossible: Without the advantages of attending an elite school like Stanford or MIT, or a built-in network bequeathed by wealthy parents, he managed to cold-call (well, cold-email) his way into a summer internship at Palantir, then one of Silicon Valley’s hottest data-mining startups.

For the computer science major from Michigan Technological University, located in the small Upper Peninsula town of Houghton, a job at the CIA-backed company was a ticket to the big leagues. Sweet gigs at VC-backed software unicorns, complete with high salaries and equity grants, were sure to follow.

Days after arriving at Palantir’s Washington, D.C., office in May 2012, though, the 6-foot-1 Midwesterner had serious self-doubts. The 15 other interns seemed to hail from a different universe. They all attended brand-name schools and spent much of their time chatting about their high-end research projects or bragging about upcoming European vacations. Lord’s only trip out of the U.S. was to nearby Canada for a hockey tournament when he was a young teen.

That’s when the light bulb lit up: What if Lord could create software to connect talent-hungry companies to the thousands of students across the country at lower-profile schools like Michigan Tech? “There are talented students everywhere. And what Zip code you grew up in shouldn’t define the career outcome you have after college,” he says. “At Michigan Tech, we weren’t seen.”

Today nearly 12 million college students (many with little or no job experience) from 1,400 colleges and universities around the U.S. use the platform to search job postings from 750,000 companies, message with recruiters and alumni, attend virtual career fairs and conduct video interviews. The students don’t pay a dime, but their schools pay an average of $8,000 a year. The 1,110 companies that pay for a premium version of the platform dish out even more: anywhere from $15,000 to several million dollars a year, which enables them to send targeted job postings to candidates based on their current location, gender, underrepresented group status, major, GPA, specific skills (such as JavaScript or Python coding) or school—for instance, letting them market to historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs). (Employers can also use all of these segments, except race and gender, to search for individual candidates.)

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